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Plugin or Gem install is too slow

I'm using a Macbook with Leopard 10.5.4 . When I try to install a plugin
from a remote source via Terminal it takes a long time to finish
downloading all the files to my vendor/plugins folder. My internet
connection is not slow (average of 4Mbps). When surfing with a normal
browser, eg firefox, it's not slow at all . I tried several plugins from
different locations and with all of them installation was very slow.
Does anyone have an idea why it's too slow?

When I downloaded some gems, I got to the line
"Bulk updating source index"
and it seemed to hang. What actually was happening, is the download went fine, but it took a long time for Ruby to do it's thing. I could hear a lot of CPU crunching going on, lots. And it took literally hours to complete, hours. VERY aggravating, and I consider myself to have lots of patience.
I guess it's doing stuff like unzipping and verifying checksums, reading and writing to files, etc. In any case, if you're hearing a lot of crunching going on, try to be patient. I tried going offline a few times after the initial transfer was complete. Sometimes Ruby needed to be connected to the net, and the whole thing aborted so I had to start again. AAARRRRGGGHHHHH! But other times it stopped on a "Do you want to instll dependency ...." prompt and I could reconnect without losing ground.

What amazes me is when I´m watching a screencast like peepcode or railcast and the computer the guy is demonstrating some plugin install, just do it in a fraction of a second ... how come? ... maybe plugin install is some kind of VIP only, heheh

I never had any problems with installing plugins, i.e. they all always installed fast.

But installing gems from Rubyforge (where most gems are hosted) can often hang on "Bulk updating source index". However, it's not a problem with Ruby doing something - problem is that there are a lot of gems on RubyForge and it often takes a lot of time to update them all. You connection speed is irrelevant, I had a same problem on server that has much more than 4Mb/s.

You can increase the bulk update threshold when installing gems, and you be able to see the progress. Try doing something like: